Bodies Yield Evidence of Hussein-Era Killings

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 11 — Beneath the clinical glare of fluorescent lights in a collection of makeshift laboratories here, the victims of mass murder under Saddam Hussein are slowly brought back to life.

For two years, a team of forensic scientists from around the world has sifted through bones, clothes, identity papers and spent bullet casings exhumed from mass graves to build criminal cases against Mr. Hussein and to reconstruct the victims’ final moments.

“I made a decision we’re going to give the individual a voice,” Michael K. Trimble, the director of the mass graves team, said during a recent tour of the laboratories, on a secret site in western Baghdad.

That voice, he said, is captured in a four-page file, one for each victim, describing the data that the scientists have been able to glean from the skeletal remains and other evidence.